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Adventuring Clichés – Revenge

This is one of those classic starting adventures. Someone has done something bad to the PCs or their family and the characters are out for revenge.

What I am wondering is how we can stretch this out to a nice round 10,000 exp per character?

This post could get a bit rambling and contradictory as I have planned nothing and I am just writing off the cuff.

The first thing that is a challenge is how to bring the characters together in the first place. My gut instinct here says the characters need a mentor. I am picturing a Jedi master type NPC. This has two advantages. The first will be slightly controversial. I am going to suggest that we give the 1st level characters 60DPs worth of hand licked skills. So a fighter PC gets ranks in core fighter skills, the ranger gets core ranger skills and so on. This is the training provided by their mentor. It is also the boost that 1st level characters need to make RMu more competent.

The second advantage of the single mentor is that he represents the closest thing that all the characters will have as common family.

This would entail a bit of extra work by the GM but it is also an opportunity for the GM to make characters, cultures and professions unique to their setting.

I think this is a useful exercise for the GM to think about how skills are used to create cultures and professions.

So the start of the adventure would be the kidnapping of the mentor. This is an opportunity for investigation and a more role played session. We can bring in non-combat skills.

If I am writing this I would make the investigation a percentage action based investigation. The longer the characters take to find the clues as to what happened and who was responsible the greater the headstart the bad guys have.

I know this is not strictly how RMu is expected to work but I think this is better, especially for 1st level characters. If you go for pass/fail skill tests for finding clues and identifying the culprits then it is entirely possible that the adventure ends here and everyone can roll a few crap rolls and then go home.

The clues that the characters find should suggest that their mentor is still alive and was kidnapped. The footprints left by the invaders contain lots of sand which suggest that they came from the local beach.

The kidnappers have indeed captured the mentor and have made their way to the beach. They are waiting for a boat to whisk them away.

Ideally the characters should arrive before the villains escape. If they were really good at the clue finding then they should fall upon the villains while they are still on the beach awaiting a launch to get from a ship in the bay to the beach.

If they were averagey then they arrive as the villains are loading their captive into the launch and they get very little time to plan and act.

If they were slow at finding the clues and putting the pieces together then they arrive as the villains are pushing their way through the surf as they make their escape.

There are two options here. The first option is that the mentor can be rescued here and he will identify the villains and charge his students with exacting his revenge. Option two is that the heroes have to mount the rescue on the ship.

There are great deck plans available for free from Rooster Games.

I am thinking that the villains send two launches to the beach, one to collect the kidnapped mentor and one to provide a rear guard. Unless the characters are exceptional then the mentor is whisked away. The rear guard launch provides the characters with a way get to the ship. The players can be given an opportunity to plan how they are going to take on a launch full of bad guys without destroying the boat.

Now the characters hopefully have a boat and a way of getting to the ship holding their mentor captive. They will also hopefully have some sailor style uniforms. The challenge then becomes can the characters get on board the ship. The attention would be on the captive so this would give a window of opportunity to get on board.

The challenge is now that one party of PCs vs an entire ship is simply not viable but what if the ship was actually simply a charter and the real villains are only paying passengers? This would even the odds a great deal and the ships crew would more than likely throw up their hands and not want to get into a fight between factions.

There is then a big fight and the characters obviously win and defeat the kidnappers. They are bound to want to interrogate survivors.

It turns out that these guys are simply mercenaries hired to commit the kidnapping. The real villain is a mysterious stranger in a port up the coast.

This would then prompt a conversation with the characters’ mentor about is old rival and the bad blood between them. How this rival went to the bad and had sworn to slay him and his students [the characters].

It would be too much to ask for the characters to take on this evil double of their own mentor but it could turn out that the mysterious stranger in the port was not the evil mentor himself but one of his students.

The characters then travel to the port, track down the villain try and defeat him.

I think we could then offer the GM a number of branches at that point. If the evil mentor had a ‘party’ of students and each one had a dark scheme to try and defeat the good mentor, a sort of competition or right of passage then we have an extended set of adventures.

So far we have had an investigation, conflict on the beach, conflict on the ship, investigation in the foreign port and finally conflict against the evil student. That would be a four significant story goals and/or session goals. The reveal of the evil mentor and the conflict would be a campaign goal. That is probably be enough to level up the party.

Having skimmed read this back I also think that the conflict between to two mentors could be due to the evil mentor making a choice to dabble in demonic trading. Doing the demons bidding in exchange for power and forbidden knowledge. The good mentor could be human and the evil double an elf which would then fit into the Elf Demon vs the Human Demon theme.

This could be the first adventure. From here we could send them to the temple ‘dungeon crawl’ as a side quest because they had heard a rumour that one of the evil mentors students had journeyed there to consult the priest at that temple.

The Murder of Crows encounter could be run before, on the road from the port to the temple, or after the temple adventure. Thus stringing the three adventures together.

By the time they have finished this, the murder of crows and the temple they would be around 3rd level and had two demonic adventures.

This is beginning to sound like the start of a campaign.

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Zweihänder Read Through – The Conclusion

The final chapter of the core Zwei book is the starting adventure and I am not goung to spoil that. So in effect that is the end of the read through.

All GMs are magpies. We will happily steal ideas from anywhere. The two things I have already tried to introduce to my game are Zwei style wilderness travel and encounters and the way that Zwei treats chases as what we would consider percentage action manoeuvres.

What I would really like to adopt, but it would be a massive amount of work would be Zwei style spell failures. Scrap the spell failure table and adopt spell specific effects.

Part of my motivation for that choice is that I don’t like the failures that dump the PC into a coma for months. In effect that is most likely game over for that PC and all because of two poor rolls the player had no control over.

There needs to be consequences but random death needn’t be on of them.

I can see two solutions to this. The first is the piecemeal answer. I tell my players that I will not be using the RAW spell failures. Then on the occasions that we actually get spell failures I create an on the fly unique spell failure for that spell and jot it down in my notes. At the end of the session I add that new spell failure to the spell list as the new default spell failure. I could over time create two. One for a straight spell failure and one for an ESF induced spell failure.

The sort of thing I mean is something like Light. On a regular failure it covers everyone in the light spells radius with an flickering glow, this impedes stalking and hiding rolls by -25 to -75 depending on the lighting conditions.

On the ESF failure the light spell creates a chain lightning effect centred on the caster with the casters ESF penalty as the OB.

That last one sounds drastic but there are spells that can defend against the effect such as lightarmor and lightningarmor. This time the caster will probably be hurt but they can also mitigate against some of the effects.

Option 2

A second option is to adopt HARP scaleable spells into RMu. The reason this is an attractive option is that there are a relatively small number of discrete spells in HARP so working through them all sequentially is not such a big task. Much of the work involved in converting from HARP to RM has already been done so that isn’t much of a burden. The HARP rules have a full entry for each spell so adding in the failures to that page is simple. RM on the other hand has the same spells turning up on half a dozen lists rather than a single source.

For me and my preferred play style the HARP option also brings with it added bonuses. I prefer a low magic game where characters have fewer spells and have to be creative to make the best use of them.

RMu with its spells as skills approach has no mechanic to stop a PC just learning enough of Invisible Ways to get Invisibility, just enough Lofty Bridge to get Fly, and so on so by 4th level they basically can do everything.

With HARP spells the character has to learn the individual spells so one can have gate keepers to that knowledge and limit the access that way while still giving people access to most of the Universal sphere so they are completely functional.

This is a thought for when we finally see RMu in all its glory.

Getting back to Zwei for a moment. The other lasting impression I got from the rules is how incredibly slick the game is. It all [skills, magic, monsters] feels like one coherent system. The characters alignment and in play choices drives the corruption mechanic, corruption can lead to mutations, the bestiary has an entire section for mutants. That sort of chain of consequence is common and it explains where all these mutant creatures come from.

The combat is not as bloody as Warhammer but it is still bloody and specific wound driven like RM. As Hurin once said, once you have rolled 1d8 for damage, you have rolled them all.

I think Zwei is a big threat to RMu’s commercial success. I can think of no unique selling point for RMu except one.

That USP is that there are thousands of original Pete Fenlon MERP books out there and people love them. RMu is close to the original MERP/RM that should people want to use these old sources with a new game then RMu may be the logical choice. How compatible it is will be rather debatable and that is rather niche USP. Those books are rare and getting rarer by the day and there will never be any more of them.

MERP aside, every feature that made us fall in love with the game when held up against RuneQuest and D&D; Zwei has and does equally well. In addition Zwei is available right now and people are buying it so it is eating up those customers who will only buy one gritty, simulationist, D100 system.

Another disturbing thing is that Zwei was designed to be a core system behind a “Powered by…” family. This is something that I was advocating for RMu last year. It is now a reality in Zwei. They are working on a US Colonial Period game powered by Zweihänder. It will be the first of many.

One cannot help but think that RM will be forever niche until use old time players die off and then RM will die with us.

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Zweihänder Read Through – The Bestiary

The Zweihänder bestiary is small but fully functional. This is particularly interesting considering the issues that RMu has with the sheer size of Creature Law.

The philosophy is that each creature has a true name, and that is what you look it up under in the rules. Each creature also has many local names. So there is an entry for Nephilim but the may be known as Frost Giants in the north but Jotun in the south.

A creature entry is built out of a stat block of numbers and percentages that holds the same information as a character record. Below that is where it gets fun. Every creature is built from Traits, like character Talents. Each changes the behaviour in particular situations or confers some special ability.

These traits are brief but are written out in full, just a sentence or two at most. This means that you can run an entire encounter with each beast straight from the page with no flipping back and forth to check details.

It is dead easy to swap out a trait to modify a creature. For an adventure I was working on I took a centaur and swapped out its hind legs and gave it a mermaid’s tail to create the Ichthyocentaurs from the Greek myths.

The result is that a monster stat block is an entire column or half a page but everything is exposed and simplicity itself to tweak and change.

That ‘ease of change’ makes the next part make sense.

Where we have entire pages of stats for normal creatures, then normal sea creatures, then normal flying creatures etc., etc. Zwei has a single entry each for small critters, large critters, large and small man eaters and large and small insects. These six entries cover the entire mundane animal kingdom.

You want an Ethiopian Pegasus then take a large critter and slap some wings and horns on it. You want a tiger then it is a large man eater.

The players will never see the monster stats so the fact that a lion and a tiger are functionally the same is irrelevant. The big difference is that there could be a pride of lions as opposed to a solitary tiger.

Abysmal Mutants

Zwei has different classes of monster and there are interactions between character talents and classes of monster. Abysmal monsters come from the abyss, mutants are were once normal but have been corrupted and grendells are those perversions of the human form that includes Centaurs, ogres and other stock fantasy monster races.

It is the abysmal and the mutant monsters that really make Zwei adventures stand out from other games and settings. That is where its unique flavour is.

The provided beasts meant that I could create an entire Jason and the Argonauts campaign and only have to tweak a handful of beasts, everything else was straight off the page.

Making Monsters

This is not strictly part of the core Zwei rules but the published has hived off all of the creation rules from making absolutely everything like monsters and profession and vehicles into its own supplement. If you are happy to use stock everything then you don’t need it but if you want to be able to built your own EVERYTHING then there is a single $15 supplement, Main Gauche, that gives you that ability.

Conclusion

The Zwei bestiary is very good, it is relatively small, extremely functional and wide ranging. It uses the same principle as CrL of building out of talents or traits but Zwei is prepared to accept a loss of definition in exchange for a massive gain in ease of use.

All in all I cannot fault the bestiary chapter.

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Octomancer rides out!

I spent a three day weekend playing Rolemaster with my group of long standing. The Friday and Saturday morning was spent GMing my Forgotten Realms campaign and Saturday afternoon/evening and Sunday morning was playing my, now 3rd level Lay Healer.

The plan for the game I was running was to finally get the characters to the BBEG’s tower, defeat the evil lady, defeat the big bad monster and rescue the folk hero they have been trying for the past month to locate.

The scene had a giant, stargate style, mirror showing swirling water but vertically, in front of which was the folk hero in some kind of energy sphere and in front of all of that was an altar to a dark god.

As the characters approached the mirror/gate started to form a whirlpool with water funnel extending deep into the mirror. As the got a bit closer the massive tentacles of our friend Octomancer lashed out fighting two of the characters at once and starting to draw on of them into the mirror.

The fighter types did a wonderful job of hacking off tentacles which our friendly neighborhood Octomancer promptly animated into undead tentacles.

Over the space of about three rounds Octo’s beak emerged from the mirror pool and it is a long time since I have seen my players as worried for their characters. At the height of the battle a black garbed witch appeared behind the altar which meant they had to split their attention between Octo and her.

That was a little disappointing as the first attack on her that landed killed her. One of the characters long doored behind her and used a wand of lightning, point blank into her back.

The only consolation for me was that the one useful magic item that she had on her was her robes and the critical completely destroyed them.

Octo was a great success. Of all the things that scared the PCs the most was the point at which one of them tried to retreat across the room, out of range and Octo’s tentacle lashed out and hit them when they thought they were safe. It is funny what gets to players.

Play Time

I got to play my lay healer. He is a 6’7″, 200lb Aryan man mountain, ironically from an incredibly poor family. Luckily for him someone spotted his magical potential and he ended up apprenticed to healers at the next cities public hospital.

The GM wanted a world where almost everyone had at least one family member who could use magic, it is a really magically infused world. To model that he had made spell lists really easy to learn and he had given us additional power points by using options in RoCoIII. We could learn spell lists concurrently up to a maximum of one for each base power point that we got. So at 1st level I had six base power points so I could learn six lists at the same time. I had put all my background options into Skill with Magic so I have a mammoth PR stat bonus. It was worth my while just putting a single rank into each of six lists when I was zeroeth level and again at first level and relying on pot luck. Now I am third level I already have 19 lists.

Everyone else pretty much did the same and the GM has realised that in next to no time we will have all the open, closed and our base lists and there will be nothing more to learn.

He solution was to tell us that he had made two rules changes. The first was that all the lists have to be learned as five level blocks, I-V, VI-X and so on. So although I have 19 list they are all just to 5th level.

The second change is that he now says that we must have learning materials to learn new lists. Our guilds/hospitals (in my case) will provide these with up to 1.5*base powerpoints in lists in the magical texts. So in my case my new book has 9 (6*1.5) lists in it but only five levels worth of each list. This is so that he can limit the number of lists that we have access to.

I kind of like the idea of a lay healers book of magical study. I can visualise it as a rather graphic book of watercolour anatomical depictions surrounded by the mystical.

I can also imagine that the GM is going to limit the opportunities for us to find people who can replenish these materials.

As I had already spent my DPs for fourth level, learning more lists as I thought I had plenty of time to really expand my capabilities before worrying about the 11th to 20th spell lists, I now find myself thinking that I could well end up with absolutely no sixth level spells when I hit sixth level. All it would take would be one level’s worth of poor rolls on my spell acquisition, and sod’s law says that the few lists I do manage to get will end up being ones with no sixth level spell in the list.

I am sure I will survive, I am the healer after all. It is everyone else that has to worry.

The remedy of halving the list length from 1-10 to 1-5 has effectively doubled the cost of spell lists. As we are all third level it does mean that that 5th/6th break point in looming quite close.

A third change he has made is the graduate the amount of stat bonus that one can apply to the spell list acquisition. As a Pure caster I can use all my stat bonus, hybrids get to use two thirds of their stat bonus and semis only one third. The party right now is a Magician, Lay Healer, Bard and Noble Warrior. Two pures and two semis. The poor semis are being hit with double the cost for their lists and a relative hit in the chances of success.

My character is going to be fine. If anything I think if the GM does limit the number of lists I can access and learn I can start to direct DPs into learning plate mail. I had initially thought I was going to avoid going down the heavily armoured mentalist route but the character has been rubbing shoulders with a lot of armoured knights recently and if I am going to have DPs I cannot spend on spells I may as well put them to good use.

It was quite interesting to see a GM go through the process of realising the consequences of applying Rolemaster optional rules that seem to do what he wants and dealing with the fall out.

The pity is that it is going to be half a year before I get to play again.

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Adventure Paths

Adventure Paths seem to keep crossing my path (pun intended) a lot recently.

I know that Brian has a 25 step adventure path in planning. I think that is going to be one of a few that we want to create as a follow on from the 50in50 that we did in 2017/2018. That project is just waiting for Brian to get ahead of RL.

I started talking about what I am now thinking of a The Demon War.

Hurin posted on the forums about how msto people play D&D up to about 10th level. That makes sense to me. If you want to play more than one PC then the speed my group goes even 10th level would take several human years.

My last RM related post was about experience points and each of the starting adventures I have been describing have come in at about 10k EXP per adventure. That is enough to level people up. In RMu there is no step change in EXP at 6th, 11th 16th levels like there is in RMxx.

If you played each of the planned adventures back to back, 12 adventures over 12 months then you would be 12th to 15th level come the end of the year.

Now to add in another element I say this post on a discord server…

“Mike MylerToday at 05:38

I am releasing a 340 page adventure path soon It’s a bigass hardcover book. Kill people with it kinda big. I also have the 6 adventures it largely revolves around prepared as softcover books approved for print.”

Mike’s AP is not for RM so don’t get excited. The point is that has an introduction, six adventures and then a finale plus he says 130 pages of supporting material to tie it all into a single adventure path.

So if we were looking at eight specific steps, each of which yielded 10k experience then characters would finish it at about 9th to 11th level depending on your starting level, maybe has high as 12th or 13th depending on experience from personal experience goals.

I am not that keen on the idea of linear adventures.

I am determined to make good use of City of Forgotten Heroes. I am thinking that it could make a good penultimate step in an adventure path. The thing is that with that I created the scalable encounters with different creatures for different power levels.

If I were to build in scalable encounters for these adventures so the monsters changed depending on level of the party and I used the H system for the numbers of creatures encountered these adventures would scale by level and for the party size.

This means that whether you start parties at 1st level, like I do, or 5th level like Spectre does or want to start people at 10th level to have a truly epic game these adventures should still work.

With some clever adventure design and more importantly clever story telling these adventures should be able to be played in any order. One could even make it a true sandbox where the adventures exist in their own right and the bad guy’s plans progress up until they hit the characters who inevitably ruin the bad guy’s day. Each adventure would provide some additional clues or benefit to assist the characters in defeating the ultimate bad guy.

I think I could write an eight part adventure path. It is less of a mammoth task than some of the APs I have been looking at. I originally thought that they were designed to take characters to 20th level. Obviously 10th level is a lot easier to write for than 20th.

Any thoughts or opinions?

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Zweihänder Read Through – Game Mastery II

This is the second of my posts on Zweihänder’s mammoth Game Mastery ‘chapter’.

The first bit that sticks out is the world building rules. So far I have been somewhat critical about how Zwei can be both setting neutral and yet detail races, magical sources, gods, religions and to some extent monsters. The last will come up in a later post but the rest are, to my mind, all setting dependent.

The solution is an onion skin approach to campaigns. The inner most layer of the onion is the core rules. You can always remove stuff from the core rules like red lining gnomes or pyromancers. What you are left with are the game mechanics for your game.

The next layer is the campaign layer. These are brief descriptions of actual settings. There translate the rules as written into setting specific versions. This is where you can rename gods and their spheres of influence or decide on different magical sources.

This being Zwei, campaigns are based around conflicts. I believe this is a WFRPG concept but the campaign layers describe The Enemy Within, The Enemy Without, The Enemy Beyond and then a set of adventure hooks or ideas. So ‘within’ details the internal struggles within the nations detailed in the setting. ‘Without’ details potential hooks for adventures centred on other nations or powers from trading partners to demonic forces. The Enemy Beyond is all about the supernatural forces acting on the setting.

This section gives guidelines on creating your own campaign layers, such as Carrion Crows a user created world of corruption and contagion. There are also prepared settings such as the 30 years war (Germany 1630), a fantasy setting, Goth Moran Divided and an Egyptian campaign. That is only a selection.

The cool thing is that this does demonstrate the flexibility of the system and I can understand why they maintain that the core rules are setting neutral.

Hmm,

There will always be things that I don’t like. I am sure that if ten GMs read this core book then there would be ten different opinions about what is great and what is not so great.

Stables of Characters

Zwei is so dangerous that it is suggested that players create a small stable, three or more, PCs. Each completely different from each other. When playing a character all the other characters in the stable earn 50% of the experience (Reward Points) that the main character earns.

The point of the stable of spares is so that a replacement character can be cycled in should PC#1 meet their maker. It is also suggested that the most appropriate character is used for each adventure.

I struggle with this. I struggled with the completely random PC generation and once I had my PC I could not identify with him. I could cope with just about everything except random alignment. As a result alignment has atrophied to the point where it is playing no part in my game. If alignment is a barrier to having fun then alignment is asked to leave.

Stables of PCs are also something I seem to be struggling with. I like to invest in my PCs. I don’t know what personalities they will have until I start playing and their personalities develop over time. With a stable of characters their personalities are turning out to be shallow, more me than anything that has grown out of the game.

This is possibly more me than the rules as written.

Carrion Crows

I want to talk a bit about Carrion Crows . This is not an official part of Zwei. It is a 3rd party campaign layer written in the format recommended by the Game Mastery chapter.

Carrion Crows is a $1.99 supplement for Zwei. It centers around the nation of Albion and follows the Within, Without and Beyond format. It then goes on to introduce custom rules for a phenomena called Contamination that is highly contagious, as you would expect, and can infect player characters and cause all kinds of horrible effects.

The ‘stars’ of Carrion Crows are the crows themselves. These are the myriad of groups and bands that pick over the remains following battles. Each organisation is nicknamed a ‘nest’ and the members are the crows.

Nests and Crows are a useful vehicle for bringing characters together and allocating missions.

Magick, with a ‘K’, is incredibly rare in Zwei but Carrion Crows introduces a lesser form of magical item, more akin to luck charms. Items that give a little bonus here and there. They still fall into the core model of petty, lesser and greater and they still use the incantation skill to activate which makes the liable to critical successes and failures

You then get a sampling of these less powerful magics. Albion is intended to be higher magic than Zwei is off the shelf.

I have always said that I could not create a setting as they are too much work. I look at Terry’s efforts and marvel. A Zwei style campaign layer on other hand I could create. This whole thing is 21 pages, 20 without the cover and only 15 if you take the art out, and is perfectly playable.

I could create a 15 page setting. That is in the same ballpark as GRAmel‘s mini settings and they are my favourite. I am not saying that Zwei settings are like GRAmel settings, they are not but both can easily fit into 15 to 20 pages.

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Adventuring We Shall Go – Experience

I have been planning this post for a while but the blog is so busy these days with so many new voices that I was having trouble finding a free day. I try and avoid two posts in a single day as every post should have its moment in the sun.

The caravan guard adventure that we did earlier in the year has been at the fore of my thoughts for the last week or so.

The events in that adventure can be boiled down to these:

  1. get supplies for the caravan
  2. defeat toll/highway robbers
  3. relieve town from disease
  4. save wagons from wolves
  5. goblin tower
  6. protect wagons from monks
  7. learn the truth about the monks
  8. defeat wagon guards
  9. defeat caravan captain
  10. defeat pirates
  11. restore artifact to monks

RMu experience is broken in to events. The personal events are going to vary but as this is intended to be a first adventure for the characters I think there will be lots of firsts. Personal awards should be within the 10-1,000exp range with about 100exp being typical, 100 is the top of the minor award range and the bottom of the moderate award range and I do not think a character is going to have any major personal events in their first adventure. I should have thought that an active player should be able to rack up 1,000 exp from personal events over this adventure.

I do not think there will be any campaign awards except for a single award for completing the adventure. That should come to 1,000xp each for surviving the adventure.

What we are left with is session events. The events in this adventure tend to be what I think of as moderate events. Moderate events have a price tag of 500-1000 exp each. There are ten such events in this adventure which should, on average come in at about 7,500 experience.

If we add on the personal and the campaign experience then we are looking at about 9,500 each. A generous GM would probably stretch that to the 10,000 needed to level up.

I think that this could easily stretch to three or possibly four sessions. I also think that leveling up after three or four sessions is about right.

Goal Setting

I have assumed that the characters are actually 1st level for this adventure and as such I have hobbled the monks somewhat. I have them a very high level of self preservation, injure one and two others will help the wounded monk from the battle field. This means that I can throw a veritable army of monks at the caravan but not kill the party unintentionally. I have also made them 1st level. If you have gone with a 2nd or 3rd level starting party they will have a serious power level advantage.

The goblins are 2nd level but they will be met during the day unless the characters decide to try and sneak past during the night. The goblin sensitivity to daylight in a big balancing factor. -25 is more than anyone will gain in a single level of advancement so it more than wipes out the 1 level advantage that the goblins have over starting characters.

Once the characters have joined forces with the monks they have the numerical advantage in all the future encounters.

I think aiming for 10,000exp per adventure is a good ball park figure for these starting adventures.

I am going to revisit each of the suggested adventures so far and see if they also hit the 9,000-10,000 exp figure.

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An RMu Adventure Path?

One of the criteria I set myself for my starting adventures for RMu was that the creatures had to exist in all versions of RM, right from RM2 to RMu.

Once you take into account that I writing for 1st to 5th level, this has lead to a rather refined list of available monsters.

The most commonly occuring have been goblins; the lowest levels of undead, Skeletons to Ghouls and surprisingly Demons.

I have used the lowest level Man-Demon, the Hothrog in ‘A Murder of Crows’ and the lowest level Elf-Demon in the last outline, the dungeon crawl.

Constantly at the back of my mind is City of Forgotten Heroes. The keystone of that adventure is a magical throne that corrupts those that sit upon it into becoming a necromantic tyrant.

I bet you can see where I am going with this….

Who or why would anyone ever make a magical throne that creates necromantic tyrants, they are only going to be trouble.

The answer is probably some kind of chaotic Demon who can just light the blue touch paper and retire.

I made CoFH scalable so characters of pretty much any level could attempt it.

What I am thinking is a Man-Demon vs Elf Demon rivalry or even war brewing. The temple adventure I outlined last week becomes one side trying to create a foothold in the mortal world. A probing attack. The tower in A Murder of Crows is the same thing but the other side.

These could be two early steps on an adventure path that has the backdrop of two demon princes waging a personal war. There are Elf and Man Demons at 2nd, 4th, 6th/7th and 11th/12th levels and then the big bad boy is the Celebdel a 20th level Elf Demon.

I have never read an adventure path but I can see the characters gaining a reputation as demon slayers and a linked set of adventures against increasingly dangerous foes.

If we have a region of the world that is succumbing to demonic invasion we can challenge the characters with both increasing numbers of lower level demons as well as increasingly more dangerous demons. As this is a regional threat, just a spat between rivals, it could be dropped into anyone’s campaign and it will not spell the end of the world. As the threat starts as a minor and unrecognised threat that would explain why inexperienced PCs end up dealing with it. As their experience grows as does their reputation for demon slaying so they naturally become the ‘go to’ group of adventurers.

One of the entry points for CoFH was that there was a body of elves that would sponsor the party in some way. At that point it was because it was essential that the characters had some sort of magical weapons as the adventure only used non-corporeal undead.

Now we would have that group of elves as an organisation that has an awareness of powershifts in the Elven demonology. We could even have a bias. Is CoFH a result of Man-Demon manipulations so the Elven elements want it disrupted and the elves their to serve their Elf Demon dark lord?

Is the cursed throne sought by the Elf Demon for his or her own schemes?

Right now I have four dots that I could put in a line, the temple, the tower, the elves and the city.

I know there is an official group of volunteers trying to put together an adventure path. I am not part of that group. I lack the Shadow World knowledge. I also do not know how active that project is or its scope.

I can see the cumulation of this idea being a showdown with a Moloch complete with demonic lieutenants. That is a 35th level end of level boss, maybe with a number of 20th level demons equal in number to the number of party members. That is a tough confrontation against virtual demigods.

What are the odds of a party of 20th level PCs surviving their own number of 20th level foes with a 35th level overlord?

How big would I have to make this thing?

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Dungeon Crawl, Meet The NPC

Dungeon Crawl Time!

This is going to be a 1st level adventure so it is not going to be big or overly dangerous.

I have my locations in my mind.

The starting location is an end of the line village. it has more empty houses then occupied ones. The problem is that their priest went mad and has been spreading all sorts of End is nigh! ravings and that has upset the neighbouring villages to the point where they stopped coming to the market. A couple of months ago the priest finally disappeared, presumed run off into the wild. The village feels better off without him.

The temp where the priest lived over looks the town and is now a dark and foreboding place and shunned by all.

The village is in a spiral of decay. As people leave the few remaining businesses find it harder to make a living. As they close then it becomes harder to live here.

Now people have started to disappear. Not just leave but disappear not taking any of their possessions, not saying goodbye. One day they are here and the next morning gone.

Those are the two locations, village and temple.

The temple has four levels. It is a Dyson Logos map. This version lacks the grid but it will be with the grid when I publish this in the fanzine.

This is the upper section. As you walk in the entrance you have a sloping passageway down below ground or the left and right entrances to the chambers on this level. You cannot get to the upper floor from here.

The advantage of the ground floor is the ease of escape and it is obviously of limited scope. As soon as you go underground there is no telling how big the place is.

These are the underground parts. There are two underground levels. The route to the upper storey is down to the underground level take the first right and then follow it round to the left.

We know the monsters in this adventure are the Daedhel as the villains with skeletons and the odd mindless animated corpse. That is going to give the temple a certain smell.

There is no need for the undead to see and there are no windows so this place is dark.

I have not specified the religion for this temple so the GM can adorn the walls and wall hangings with scenes from their favourite religion to add a bit of game setting flavour.

The villains headquarters will be the upper level I think. That means crawling their way through a lot of the complex, in the dark, fearing attack.

Fear

I want to make fear and the aura given off by the demons a real feature. To this end and to boost the starting party I want to give the party a couple of battle tanks to increase their fighting ability.

When they are in the village they will be lent the taverners guard dogs to take with them to the temple. Brutus and Spartacus are his pride an joy.

A large dog will whoop a starting PC’s arse at the drop of a hat. They are 4th level, 65hits, AT3 with a 70DB and a Medium bite and 45OB. In RMu The Medium Dog serves the same role.

The beauty of having dogs and not NPCs or dogs as NPCs are that even if they do outshine the PCs in combat they cannot reason, the PCs or players will not ask their opinions as locals and they are unlikely to be elected leader by the new party.

On the other hand, if you want fear to be a factor a dog wears its feelings on its sleeve. If it is scared then it will show you instantly. It has no compulsion about running from a fight and it doesn’t understand the plan. I just want to players to make a wonderful plan based upon stealth, followed by amazing stalking and hiding rolls, and then have the dogs start barking their heads off at the first sign of movement in the dark.

These will be big brave dogs until something bites back and then suddenly they turn tail, literally, and run. Of course good dogs may comeback into the fight is someone who has treated them nicely is in fear or pain. Dogs are very empathic.

The GM can use the dogs as signals. If the dog is reluctant to enter somewhere will the players pick up on the cue? If they start whimpering and shying away will they force them on or set them free?

If a dog suddenly disappears into the darkness chasing something and then comes back with a bone what will the players think? Is the bone human?

What do you think? It is a big enough ‘dungeon’? Do you like the dog idea?

The post has sparked another thought and I want to look into that in different post. It has to do with low level demons.

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What Does a Roleamster Dungeon Crawl Look Like?

This is part of my looking at first adventures. The most clichéd of all clichés must be the basic dungeon.

The challenge for rolemaster GMs and players alike is wound management in a dungeon. You may survive your first fight but you could carry a lot of penalties into the next fight.

Traditionally, or should I say instinctively, I think of dungeons starting with weak foes and then as you progress in they get tougher and tougher until you meet the final challenge, the end of level boss to borrow from video gaming.

In Rolemaster that really is a death sentence. None of your players characters will be functioning by the time they met the big bad evil guy.

Wounds are not the only consideration.

Magic

I am trying to write these for all version of Rolemaster and here another big difference becomes apparent.

A RM2/RMC spell caster is going to have 1 to 10 power points. I know 10 seems a lot but that is how many my Lay Healer had at first level. I used one background option on Skill at Magic and rolled an extra Power Point per level, a second BGO got me a boost to my presence bonus and I used a background option to boost my Presence. The GM uses the optional rule that your Power Points are based on your Total Stat Bonus, not your stat. So I am wandering around with 5PP.

There are other BGO that serve as spell adders and spell multipliers and you can of course roll of a special item. So with naturally boosted stats, bonus PP and special items you can get as high as double figures but that is extremely unlikely.

A RMu pure spell caster is going to have double, triple or more the power points of a RM2/RMC spell caster. They also are likely to have a greater number of lists and a greater number of spells available on those lists. Using RM2/RMC RAW it is possible to have 5 spell lists if you roll like a devil.

0th level spend 20 ranks learning one list automatically and a few ranks in a second which you then fluke the roll for. Then repeat for 1st level and then again when prespending 2nd level DPs. This gives you 4 learned lists and you automatically get the 1st level spell on the list you have 20 ranks in.

So RM2/RMC characters will have less spells and less power points than RMu spell casters.

Martial characters in RMC are more competent than RM2 and both are more competent than RMu. I don’t want to discuss this point as it is ongoing on the forums right now. I believe that this will be fixed.

So is a dungeon crawl viable?

I think it is but only if we think beyond combat. As a starting adventure we want to challenge all members of the party. Throwing monsters are the party will certainly give fighters and the healers plenty to do but the rest are more limited.

I detest the Sleep V spell. I know that putting everything to sleep and then cutting their throats is very pragmatic. Keeping one or two alive to interrogate is also a perfectly valid option. It is also kind of boring.

It is when you see the players of the fighters and rogues just roll their eyes and put their dice down when the magician announcing that they are prepping Sleep V that you realise that the spell just robs three quarters of the party of their reason for existence.

By the time you are sending foes sufficiently tough to not be affected by Sleep V then all the essence casters are throwing Sleep X around just as easily.

In my ongoing campaign I had two characters that used Sleep V as their go to spell. They ended up with so many mass combats, not because they were particularly heroic, but because I factored in enough foes to still have the number I wanted active after the spells went off. I also used waves of foes so that they could only put the foes to sleep that they could see, not the ones arriving a round later.

So combats are not good for starting level dungeon crawls. Too easy to put starting monsters to sleep and with the lack of places and time to rest the attrition is likely to prove fatal to a starting party.

RMu To The Rescue

In all the adventures I have written this year I have picked monsters that existed in all versions of RM. This time is no exception. I am going to build a dungeon using Daedhel. These are perfect. What makes them perfect is that they come fitted with a Fear Aura as standard. They also come in pairs. I would suggest that one is presented as a false end of level boss and then mid way through the final battle the second one arrives and joins the fight as a fresh foe.

I am seeing a throne room type location with two thrones, one Daedhel the dias. Battle ensues and then Daedhel number two arrives. The players then think, oh yeah, he said there were two thrones, D’oh!.

Daedhel also come with 14PP (Chan/Ess) according to the RMu CrL. So there is no reason for these guys not to animating skeletons or fallen PC/NPCs as zombies. There is nothing wrong with them making good use of things that they find lying around their lair.

Completely new players are likely to assume that demons are not going to be effected by Sleep spells. Also if the main defenders they have fought so far have been undead, who are also not effected by mental attacks by the time they reach the BBEGs they are unlikely to use it as their ‘go to’ attack.

Skeletons and Demons don’t eat so that whole thing of what do people eat in this dungeon is a non-question. The skeletons are explained by the presence of undead creating demons so that is coherent. The Demons can actually serve as an edventure hook in their own right. In truth the real BBEG is not in this dungeon, the two Daedhel are simply higher up minions. They were put in the dungeon and told to start building an undead army. To do that they needed bodies and that is why they are in an out of the way place, peace to work, and have been killing people, for the undead and as an adventure hook.

The characters in clearing the dungeon derail the plans of the BBEG and save the nearest villages, Hurray!, and make an enemy of the BBEG, Boo!

Dungeons are more than monsters in a house

The secret to a really good low level dungeon crawl is the environment. The undead do not need to see so there is no light, they do not eat or feel cold but the characters do. The Daedhel do eat, they are carnivores, but I do not see them as either house proud or tidy eaters. Add on top two more factors. The place is used for storing dead bodies and has a number of animated corpses in it. Daedhel have the Distinct Odour talent/flaw.

As a GM we can use the senses of the characters against them. How about a failed or partially successful perception check combined with some dead bodies and flickering torch light? The question is “Are they moving?” or did the character only think they twitched or flinched?

Opening doors should be accompanied with waves of putrid air but places where the Daedhel have recently been should have the taint of something altogether ungodly.

That smell can be used to warn inexperienced characters that the Daedhel are coming or at least nearby. A Daedhel covered by an unseen spell may choose to simply observe the invading characters. They would certainly have enough time to have created some mindless undead to serve as their undead army.

The fear aura is about more than a resistance roll. Whether that is passed or failed will of course change the capabilities of the party but there are loads of role play opportunities that go with it that we can use as GMs. Things like hairs standing up on the backs of you neck. You can just describe those for the atmospheric effect.

In my next post I will write this up as an adventure. I also have something really cool to add to it that I have not touched up here. I think you are going to love it.